Worker Killed at Construction Site

A construction foreman was crushed to death Wednesday when a 35-ton section of concrete wall fell on him at a building site in Rancho Santa Margarita, authorities said.

Harold Cooper, 48, a foreman for Howell & Bros. of Las Vegas, and another worker were using hydraulic jacks to align the 15-by-20-foot wall when it tore loose from the metal brackets and fell, witnesses and investigators said.

Cooper died instantly, said Capt. Scott Brown of the Orange County Fire Authority. The other worker was not injured.

Brown said a faulty jack may have caused the wall to break loose.

“The accident happened so quickly, in a blink of an eye,” he said. “There was very little reaction time for anybody to safely escape.”

The incident occurred just after noon at 22822 Avenida Empressa, an industrial site where two large warehouses are being built.

Martin Bruenieks, a welding inspector who was at the scene, said Cooper had helped to build the concrete panel recently and was on site to monitor its installation.

When the accident happened, Bruenieks said, he felt the ground shake but could not fathom at first what had occurred.

“They were trying to align the slab, and then it broke free from the brackets,” Bruenieks said. “A worker yelled, ‘Watch out!’ ”

“It was really hard to understand there was somebody down there,” he said, that “there was a man underneath the panel and we couldn’t do anything to save him.”

Bruenieks said workers used a crane to try to lift the wall panel, still hoping that Cooper had managed to escape. “We weren’t completely sure he was underneath it. We were hoping that he wasn’t,” he said.

When rescue personnel arrived, they inflated large air bags under the panel to lift it, then extricated Cooper, who was already dead.

Don Howell, the owner of the construction company and a personal friend of Cooper’s for 18 years, was at the site Wednesday. His office staff said he was too distraught Wednesday afternoon to talk about the tragedy.

As investigators from Cal/OSHA, the Orange County coroner’s office and the Sheriff’s Department tried to determine how the accident happened, construction workers stood by quietly.

One worker who witnessed the tragedy sat in his truck, smoking a cigarette. He and others would not comment on what they had seen.